The Ground Between

Being Raised on Threshold Land

Thirty years ago, I named liminality as the foundation of my theology of ministry. Not as a single idea, but as something I kept discovering, again and again, in threshold spaces.

As a seminary intern, I worked with clients who were homeless and living with mental illness. Together, we arranged an art show, Silent Undercurrents, their work, hung in my seminary. Our daily noon chapel was the opening of the show and a reception. The artists spoke about what their work meant to them. I spoke about what they meant to me.

I remember looking around that room — my professors, my classmates, people who had never stood in that particular in-between before — and understanding, for the first time, that liminal space wasn’t just something I could enter. It was something I could hold open for others to enter too.

The Other Place, 1995

As an assistant chaplain at Bellevue Hospital, chaplaincy taught me the most about holding space, especially liminal spaces, for others. Folks living in the spaces between sickness and health, life and death, coherent and unraveling. My most hard-won learning was that being a chaplain wasn’t a role to take on. Chaplaincy, instead, was teaching me about everything I had to let go of — my ideas, my assumptions, the heady theories that kept me at a safe distance from the patient. That whole summer was learning to peel away what kept me from being fully present, feeling my feelings, being myself as I kept vigil with someone else’s unfolding.

It is as alive to me now as it was then.

Long after seminary, life continued to bring me to the brink of myself (as it does for all of us). Pregnancy and the birth of my son. An abortion. The deaths of my parents and stepdaughter in quick succession. Each experience brought me to a new threshold. The ground I thought was reliable gave way. No longer the person I used to be and unsure of who I would become. My only choice in those seasons was to fight for what had been, or surrender to the unknown. Usually I tried both, but on a few rare occasions, I stood still.

I remember standing in my parents’ kitchen, my mom had died the year before, and I was watching my friends pulling out serving utensils, setting out plates and silverware, preparing the “good food” my dad had requested for after his funeral. My feet were planted on the kitchen floor. I watched in awe as they took care of everything around me, because honestly, I just couldn’t.

At that time, I believed receiving gifts from people created a debt, an obligation, to return the generosity. A deeper, wiser part of me knew it wasn’t true, but “good girl Jenny” hung on to the debt. After my mom’s death and then my dad’s, I stood there knowing it would be impossible to ever “pay back” all these people for taking such good care of me, my son, and my brothers. So much help, so much love. My only choice was to receive it. To let the love wash over me. To surrender.

Thirteen years have passed from that day in my folks’ kitchen. I now find myself standing in my native gardens, meadows and prairies, aware of that same feeling - being undone by the sheer generosity and abundance of it all. My spiritual practice is reminding me I live in both/and. I am the threshold and I hold the in-between spaces.

Blazing Star Prairie, Native Lands Restoration Collaborative

I keep returning to this idea that if liminal spaces exist in life, in a body, in a season of grief, they must exist somewhere in the land too. So began my quest. Where am I, this lover of the prairie and liminal spaces, planted?

Not surprisingly, I discovered I live in an actual physical liminal space - an ecotone. I was born and raised and currently live in the forest-grassland ecotone. A transition zone, a meeting ground, a dialogue between two ecosystems that gives birth to something new. The part of the country where the Eastern deciduous forests gradually give way to Mixed Oak and Hickory trees, and grassland increases, that transition eventually completed by my beloved tallgrass prairie.

As much as I have loved my sojourns in other states and countries, I only feel truly at home in this land between forest and grassland — where the sky is massive, and the prairie plants sway to the wind like the surface of some green, landlocked ocean. This threshold land birthed me. The liminal experiences throughout my life were seeded in this ground that first held me.